The race is not for the "800." It is for market and share. There is a narrow and shrinking window of opportunity to establish one's products and services in the market. Once missed, gone forever. .

I am afraid we are talking about different topics. I posted about why Cingular had apparently decided not to carry the 700...if your gonna quote my post, the response should have something to do with that postulation.

As good as it is, the 650 is not even a place-holder in the market. While Cingular seems to see no urgency to complete UMTS coverage (and markets it only for PCs, not smartphones), the European and Asian carriers have already done so. How long will people wait for an expensive Palm or Treo device before committing to a competitive one? That loud sound you hear is the window slamming shut.

You lost me....Palm's growth in this sector in recent quarters has been more than twice that of the nearest competitor in the US market. If everybody else is so hot, why aren't they growing market share here ? As for European and Asian carriers, the 650 in E/A amounted to less than 1 percent of Treo sales. As of yet, Palm hase made no strong attempt to penetrate the E/A market. The position of senior vice president of worldwide sales was created for Harnett to do just that and he was put there only 6 months ago !

As for Cingular, if the rollout schedule is holding, Cingular now has 100 MMA's covered as of now, 40 more than Verizon had when it launched the 700w. With 6 separate contractors rolling out 12-15 MMA's a month, like Sprint and Verizon, 90% of the market will be covered by year's end.

It seems real hard to understand how it can be argued that Palm can lose a market (a market it created years ago) "forever" in a mere 2 or 3 months time if they don't realease a wow device before someone else does. There's a long line of Treo Killers that looked good on paper that we have already forgotten about. The Q is just the latest in that line.....lots of fanfare and "this thing will kill the Treo" posts prior to its release....and then immediately followed by "I just got me a Q" and finally by "I just returned my Q and went back to my Treo" threads.

Palm may lose its domination of the US market in the future but it's not gonna be in 2006. As for the E/A market, they are a non factor at present and the next Treo will be their frst real attempt to capture any significant share. People change cell phones on average about 18 months.....while people may show OS loyalty, brand loyalty amoung these other companies seems non existent.

I suspect that the wait may be awhile. It seems to me that Palm would be unlikely to release a 3G POS (or is that Access-powered now?) device unless it can run on both North American and European 3G frequencies, and there just aren't many devices out yet that have all 3 UMTS bands (plus the other two European GSM bands for that matter). The only device that I am aware on the market yet is the Option Globetrotter PC Card. Sierra Wireless has announed its quint-band PC Card for 3Q06, but I don't know of any quint band phones out yet. I'm afraid that we aren't going to see the 3G GSM offerings until this gets solved.

Well WM5 and "the thing that is no longer being called Hollywood" are intended to change that....tho I really don't think they will hit their stride until there's a Linux based unit. E/A governments getting pretty fed up with all things MS.